So do you think the Morgan Freeman iPad picture guy is legit?

Being an artist myself, I find it nearly impossible to have single hairs and whatnot in the exact same place (if you look at the overlay there is absolutely NO shifting of the most minute details…..seriously, stare hard enough). ESPECIALLY without having any type of pressure sensitivity and using a “tool” as fat as a finger. I just feel like it’d be more believable if some pixels were off or something, especially considering that he started off with something very general in shape yet didn’t erase any of the overall shape and still ends up with the exact same dimensions as the original. Seems like he’s doing a photo deconstruction shown backwards.

That and it also seems fishy because his portfolio, while it does have some very good portraits, is not even remotely close to having this level of hyper realism and detail. Like not even in the same ballpark.

I’m just curious to see what others think. Yes yes I’m a skeptic. I keep seeing this on tv. Maybe I should just do fake portraits from now on lol

Because of the way the video is framed, we know there was video doctoring of some sort—you see the whole iPad but no finger; you see the first action in the color palette, but then as the colors change and the brush size changes, you don’t see any further use of the palette; they also never zoom in to do the detail work; etc. Also that the image keeps moving, makes me think they’re trying to keep us from noticing something.

Theory—they began with a photo of Morgan Freeman, then worked backwards slowly painting over the details bit by bit while recording the process. (They would have to be an artist already, to know what details would be last, what would be first, so they could slowly fade them with brush strokes.) Then they reversed everything and put the video up on YouTube, and the paint falls upward into the paint can.
At around 1:55 I become especially suspicious of this.

Although I’m not sure about how the beginning would look reversed. I wonder if there was a cut in the video between two paintings at… I feel like something happens between 1:00 and 1:10 that is important.

Well, crap—as I was checking different times on the video, I saw this on the side of the page: Is It a Fake?—and they beat me to this idea; they play the whole thing in reverse.

When it gets to the part of deleting individual hairs, it seems less likely they were simply painting-over… That would require erasing single hairs over gradiating color… But I think, if they worked on multiple layers, they could have added hairs in an above layer, and then thicker-stroked over the actual painting, and then erased their hair-brush-strokes?... or something. They were clever. They’re doing something to the beard at 1:20-ish in the reverse video. They come back to after 2:10-ish.

They also had to do something different for the very beginning (the very end of the reversed video)—perhaps they had multiple layers again, and were filling in behind and then erasing… at least to me those looked backwards in the reverse-video (beginning at like 2:40). So I think they must to a stitch-together of a good initial drawing of Morgan Freeman, and the over-painting of a photo. So I’m back to my suspicions of the video between 1:00 and 1:10.